Donald Trump specifically, and transphobic conservatives generally, made much sport of the International Transgender Day of Visibility coinciding with Easter this year. Transgender Day of Visibility has been commemorated on March 31 since 2009, and Joe Biden has publicly honored both that day and the movable feast of Easter since becoming president in 2021. Yet Trump and other Republicans twisted this year’s presidential proclamations as some sort of effort to displace or abolish Easter, as the New York Times reported:
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for former President Donald J. Trump, said Mr. Biden should apologize to people who believed Sunday was “for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said Mr. Biden had “betrayed the central tenet of Easter.” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee called his proclamation “an intentional attack on religion.”
Many Republicans said falsely that Mr. Biden had declared Sunday as the transgender holiday, though the day has been observed for years.
Not satisfied with a one-off exercise in calendar demagoguery at the expense of people who have been systematically bullied (or worse) for many years, Trump has doubled down on this contrived controversy by calling for some loud-and-proud Christian vengeance to his own benefit, notes Axios:
Former President Trump at a Tuesday night rally in Wisconsin said he wants Election Day this year to be called “Christian visibility day. …”
It comes as Republicans criticize the Biden White House for recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility — which happened to fall on Easter Sunday this year. …
“Such total disrespect to Christians, and Nov. 5 is going to be called something else,” Trump declared at the rally.
“You know what it’s going to be called? Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said.
Trump’s assumption that all Christians share his thuggish attitudes toward transgender folk may just reflect his entrenched religious illiteracy, or something worse, as Baptist minister and U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock observed in response to House Speaker Mike Johnson joining in the MAGA chorus of Biden-bashing on this subject:
But transgender people aren’t the only Americans Trump and his allies want to marginalize. He may claim he wants Christians to be “visible,” but he cannot see the many, many millions of observant Christians who do not share his identification of their faith with his ideology of cultural resentment, tribalism, and privilege. We sometimes wonder, in fact, if Trump does not fear being struck by lightning whenever he invokes the name of God as though the Lord of Hosts is one of his sycophantic followers, or weaponizes the Prince of Peace for his party’s culture wars.
The 45th president’s call for turning Election Day into a Christian rebellion against Joe Biden adds insult to injury by encouraging one of the most shameful illusions of contemporary American religious conservatives: the embarrassing claim that in this country where they enjoy vast swaggering power, they are actually being persecuted. Are Christians actually “invisible” in the USA? Take a look at the skyline of any city, town, or village with its many church steeples, not to mention religious monuments and other Jesus-infused remembrances of the nation’s dominant faith tradition. Given recent trends in religious observance (and more to the point, non-observance), you could argue that Christianity is significantly over-represented in civic life. And that should be fine among Christians who honor the memory of believers who survived in catacombs and other places of secret worship and were actually persecuted with fire and death, not simply denied special privileges or forced to endure the horror of “Happy Holidays” signs at shopping malls.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is making the shotgun wedding of conservative Christianity with his reactionary MAGA movement a central ritual of his 2024 campaign, with rallies that end in virtual parodies of a worship service, as Michael Bender suggests in the Times:
In this moment, Mr. Trump’s audience is his congregation, and the former president their pastor as he delivers a roughly 15-minute finale that evokes an evangelical altar call, the emotional tradition that concludes some Christian services in which attendees come forward to commit to their savior.
“The great silent majority is rising like never before and under our leadership,” he recites from a teleprompter in a typical version of the script. “We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.”
God deliver us from this deeply sacrilegious form of Christian “visibility” in American politics. It’s a reminder that our endangered tradition of separation of church and state is important to the former as well as the latter.
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